2018: A Year In Review | æternity

2018 was quite an eventful year for both the æternity team and community. Here are some of the major milestones that we reached together!

Amid a backdrop of volatile and generally declining crypto markets, the æternity project has remained true to its vision to reimagine existing trust structures and empower users on a global scale. So many exciting developments have come about in 2018, and it will be difficult to condense them into a few paragraphs. Here is our best try.

Team!

The year started with an important partnership with Erlang Solutions, a community of experts in Erlang and Elixir development who specialize in building trusted, fault-tolerant systems that can scale to billions of users. We lit the spark of curiosity about blockchain technology in some of the most experienced Erlang developers, including Erlang’s co-creator Robert Virding. In addition, Erik Stenman, Thomas Arts, Hans Svensson, Ulf Wiger, and Tobias Lindahl — all heavy-weight developers with decades of coding experience — joined the æternity project and are focusing on building the platform. In general, the technological challenge that æternity is dedicated to solving has attracted some of the most accomplished developers in the world. Inspired by the promise of open-source blockchain technology and the vision of æternity they embarked on a journey to develop a trustless, scalable blockchain platform for the next-generation of decentralized applications. Their contributions and hard work helped keep æternity in Santiment’s top 10 list of the most active projects in the space, throughout the year.

æpps Your Mom Can Use

We’re proud that æternity’s team continued to grow, with the onboarding of UX/UI and app professionals from Ape Unit, an inclusive network of creators, developers, strategists, and designers. With their help, the websites aepps.com and dev.aepps.com were launched, and some of the first conceptual æpps were designed. With Ape Unit’s help, æternity aims to introduce the most user-friendly decentralized applications available for mobile devices.

House of Blockchain

The House of Blockchain was launched in Liechtenstein, with the goal to bring together entrepreneurs and businesses in the blockchain space in an open and collaborative environment.

The Forum

We closed Gitter and Slack to make room for a more organized resource of æternity-focused knowledge. In their place, The Forum was launched to become the place where the æternity team and the community meet in the digital space.

More Twitter Accounts to Follow

With the aim to keep the æternity community informed of all media mentions and important tech updates, we launched the @aeternityPR and @aeternityTECH accounts on Twitter. Both are a “must follow” for any æternity fan! :)

Architects of the “Blockchain Industry”

æternity remains committed to supporting burgeoning talent and the most promising companies in the blockchain space. With that in mind, the Starfleet Incubator for blockchain startups was launched in May. The Incubator’s first Demo Days were organized shortly after and 10 teams from around the world were selected to be the first builders on the æternity platform. The first versions of their applications are expected at the beginning of 2019.

Better Blockchain-Based Programs (AKA “smart contracts”)

Dissatisfied with current smart-contract security and efficiency, æternity announced its own contract languages: Sophia and Varna. Both are functional Ocaml-like languages whose syntax most strongly resembles that of Reason. The VM that supports both languages will be further improved in 2019, making them both the optimal choice of blockchain professionals and enthusiasts.

Content, content, content!

We also shared a number of insightful pieces on æternity’s blog, with topics ranging from self-sovereign identity, blockchain oracles, and state channels, to governance, functional programming advantages, DAOs, and payment gateways. We conducted one-on-one interviews with a diverse range of the æternity team members, and also organized a number of fun contests and bounties for the community.

AE Migration (Ongoing!)

In November 2018, Phase 0 of æternity’s token migration was initiated, which let users prepare their ERC-20 AE tokens for transfer to the live network. More than 89 million tokens have been transferred already and token migration is still ongoing.

All Roads Lead to Rome

The absolute culmination of all the team’s hard work was the launch of æternity’s Roma Release, the first live implementation of the æternity blockchain. æternity’s Genesis Block was instantiated by a commit to GitHub initiated by æternity Founder Yanislav Malahov, at 23:19:17, on Tuesday, November 27. The first block was created at 3:54 the following day and was mined by the community a few minutes later.

Roma features a unique stack of innovative solutions that address blockchain scalability and privacy including integrated state channels, oracles and a naming system. The Roma release also lets developers create decentralized applications in the Sophia programming language. As the first time that early adopters, developers, and miners can test and build on a live version of æternity, this release represented a pivotal moment in the history of the project.

The Two Foundations (Hari Seldon’s Way)

Finally, æternity announced the creation of two foundations, in Liechtenstein and Bulgaria, that will provide grants and educational support to innovative blockchain projects and research in the fields of blockchain technology, cryptography, and mathematics.

We are confident that 2019 will be no less momentous!

All this would not have been possible without you, æternity’s amazing community! Thank you crypto-enthusiasts, developers, app creators, entrepreneurs, designers, testers, bounty hunters and users! Here is a short video dedicated to all you:

æternity is now live, and we can’t wait to show the world what it is capable of! You are all welcome to the AE team! Our work and your valuable contributions will empower users on a global scale. We are æternity.

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